


we're bound for better sailing

by GuardianKarenTerrier



Category: Tales of Berseria
Genre: Aifread's Pirates - Freeform, Because come on, Gen, Team as Family, The Suppression, there's no way the crew let that happen, why don't more of these pirates have canon names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 12:38:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15751818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GuardianKarenTerrier/pseuds/GuardianKarenTerrier
Summary: The Suppression is the most terrifying thing Eleanor's ever seen. Luckily, Aifread's pirates are the most determined people she's ever met.





	we're bound for better sailing

**Author's Note:**

> title is from heather dale's the greyhound, a song i highly recommend, although mostly i associate voltaire's this ship's going down with Aifread's crew

The Suppression is the most terrifying thing Eleanor's ever seen. 

The effects reach everywhere- Loegres is the most obvious, and Port Zekson, but it's more than just the Westgand interior. Even as far away as Taliesin there are people complaining of voices in their heads. Velvet warps them to Stonebury to pick up supplies and weapons they haven't found elsewhere and they find the town's encouraging pioneer spirit has been nearly shattered- row upon row of people work in the fields, yes, but it was ingenuity and determination that built the frontier settlement.  Without those, Stonebury won't survive. 

There's nearly no one left with enough will in Stonebury now, which Eleanor thinks must have more to do with proximity than with strength of will- the kind of people who carved this home from nothing, from the trees and the mountains and their own stubborn wills, shouldn't be like this. 

At first she's frustrated that they aren't rushing straight to Mierchio. Surely, surely, they should be going as fast as they can to save as many as they can; but slowly Eleanor notices something- there are more pirates in Aifread's crew. 

(They will always be Aifread's crew, even as Eizen will always be First Mate; and it creeps up on Eleanor that she, herself, will also always be a member of Aifread's pirates now. Years down the line, decades away from this adventure, she will still be a member of this crew, because that's important to them all). 

The crew has always changed with some level of frequency- crew members die, or leave, or join, or stay behind in a port to be picked up later; the actual component members of the working crew are a very fluid dynamic. 

But there are a lot more people joining now, and no one seems to leave anymore. 

Of course, their crew already includes Kamoana and Medissa, who have their own domains that compete with Innominat; as do Ortho and Russ' domains, and Griffin's, and it takes Eleanor longer than she'd like to admit to realise that the Van Eltia has become the safest place in the world to be. 

Maybe the second safest. As Laphicet's vessel and Velvet's travelling companion, Eleanor herself is likely the safest human left. 

There are kids in the crew now. Velvet and Rokurou might have a habit of stealing kids (Kamoana, Laphicet himself), but not without reason, and while they're both easy around the new kids and surprisingly good with them- it's a constant shock to Eleanor, how good all her companions frequently are with children- they clearly aren't responsible for the strange sudden influx. 

It's not until they put in at Port Cadnix, their last stop before Hellawes, that Eleanor puts everything together- why they didn't go straight to their destination, why Eizen has allowed this meandering trip to every port they can reach.  (Though saying that Eizen 'allows' anything is misleading.  He would never command anyone to do anything they didn't want to).  She gets off the ship to go and see about adding to their vegetable stores and passing two of the original crew talking to the port kids. 

"Is that your ship?" the younger boy is asking with delight. 

"Aye, it is," Lupin is saying, surprisingly gently. "She's a beaut, no?" 

"She's gorgeous," another boy says wonderingly.  "Do you live on her?" 

"Aye, we do," the other pirate says, and then Eleanor hears him say, in a quiet aside, "Looks like the kids ain't been suppressed yet." 

"Yet may be the operative word," Lupin murmurs back before raising his voice. "An' we could give ye a tour, but what would your parents ha' to say about that?" 

The change in the kids is instant. The first boy, the boldest one, looks down and away and mutters something. His friend pipes up and says, "My mum hasn't been home in days, and Mikey's pa went out to the mines and he hasn't come back." 

"And your own pa an' his mum?" Lupin says, while signaling Eizen, who brushes past Eleanor with a dark look. 

"Oh- they've been gone for years now," she hears the kid say as she follows Eizen, who strides down the street and gently grabs Laphicet's shoulder as he passes the boy. Laphicet in turn tugs at Velvet's sleeve, and Velvet smacks Rokurou in the arm, and no one actually bothers to signal Magilou but she's suddenly amongst their forming group. 

"We'll check the mines," Eizen says in a low voice. "Benwick and Medissa are checking the coast." 

Eleanor thinks of the way they've split up in each town they've visited, the growing crew, their merchant contact back in Port Zekson, and winces. Of course he wouldn't have been the only one. Of course some of those affected would be parents. 

Of course the crew, who were saved by distance, by their own wills, by having welcomed therions and malakhim alike and their domains with them, even by being smacked around by Rokurou, would want to save others. Eizen's not the only one who's taken Aifread's creed to heart. The very attitude that had so offended Eleanor, far more recently than she likes to think, is what's saved them. 

They find the man in the mines. Benwick doesn't find the woman on the shore. 

They bring the man's remains back, and they bring the kids on board. 

Eleanor isn't certain how she feels about this- these kids aren't _theirs_ , after all, and now they're going to be pirates, but. But. What choice did they have? Even by the time they come back from the mines they find more adults in town falling under the wave of the suppression. Kids seem to be more resistant, for the most part- but not always, and not by much. 

The kids, and the three adults who are so alarmed and frightened that Benwick's also rounded up them up, are safer on the Van Eltia. One man isn't terribly suited to piracy- Dyle and Kurogane take him to the ship's cook and he turns out to be a fine hand at working in the galley. One of the kids gets seasick, and Eizen takes him up to the helm and patiently teaches him until the kid feels better. 

People are walking into the sea, into the mines, into their deaths, and Eleanor is always- always- aware of how easily that could have been her. 

She likes to think she's strong-willed, and Percival and Tabatha's strong wills have protected them. But Benwick is strong-willed, too, and in the company of multiple strong domains, and he'd still needed to be snapped out of it. It's frightening, how almost random the suppression seems. 

When she'd first stepped aboard, the Van Eltia had seemed confining, a prison she'd walked into of her own free will; now it's freeing, and it's her own free will it gives back to her. 

They take on pets, too. Their cook is quietly thrilled to have multiple ship's cats protecting their stores, and Benwick relents and allows dogs, though once Russ and Ortho make their objections clear any canine rescues have to transfer to the scout ship. 

It' s crowded. Eleanor's taken to napping on the deck like Velvet and Rokurou tend to, because belowdecks is always full now. There are always people fishing now- the first thing Cook teaches his newest recruit is how to stretch their supplies. They rendezvous with the scout ship, and people step from one ship to the other until the crews have evened out again. 

They have to do that three times. Eleanor's uneasily sure that somewhere, on one of the scout ship's hidden islands, there's likely a blooming settlement. Space aboard the ships is hardly infinite and not everyone they've uprooted is suited to a life at sea. Many of them, like the kids from Port Cadnix, won't have anywhere to return to even if Innominat is stopped today. 

Eleanor's glad that they're headed off to put a stop to Innominat and anxious to put their plan into motion, but she can't help but look around at the Van Eltia and think that- that these are the actual heroes, this cobbled-together pirate crew stealing people away where they can, rescuing cats and dogs and kids and frightened adults for no reason but their own convictions.  If things were different, if Eleanor weren't on the team trying to cut the head off the snake, she thinks she'd still want to be here. Aifread's pirates are not the heroes the church taught her about.  They don't act on reason, on logic; if they did they'd have sailed back to Titania and holed up there, now that they have more than enough people to defend it. 

They don't. They continue to doggedly rescue people from all over. 

They are better people than anyone she'd ever met in the Abbey. 

No matter what happens after this, Eleanor is glad to be one of Aifread's pirates.


End file.
